The Beatles - Rubber Soul [Beatles Collection Box Set - MFSL 1-106] 24-bit/96kHz Vinyl Rip

Hello Beatles Fans Everywhere,

Here is my sixth posting of the Beatles collection in two days. I am afraid to tell you all that you will have to wait until next week for Sgt. Pepper and the White Album. I'll be going out of town to photograph a wedding (hence the rsfoto nick). Please feel free to ask questions and comments this weekend. I'll have my laptop with me read and comments except Saturday PM (USA Pacific).

I am glad everyone is enjoying my rips. I appreciate all your well wishes and comments.

Wishing all a Great Weekend. Enjoy the Tunes!

Ok, to compensate for your absence, I will post Magical Mystery Tour.

Thanks!!!
Looking forward to hear and see all the others here to :)

@ Kel bazar,

You are most kind to fill in a missing piece of my collection. Glad to see one of my vinyl heroes step up to carry on this mission.

First one of these I've tried, and it sounds wonderful! Very eager to hear the White Album (the only one I've really listened to extensively). Very clean, wonderful sound, and not at all harsh and bright like the Ebbetts rips. Curiously stark stereo separation compared to pbthal's recent rip, though his setup is different and he didn't use the MFSL. Really nice work, rsfoto! A shame you can't provide all of them, but looking forward to your rips of the later albums! :)

@ ponchoman

Thanks for the kind words.

@ EVERYONE:

For Abbey Road fans, I have a mint copy of the MFSL single release of coming in two weeks, so I'll be able to add Abbey Road to my collection of rips. And we'll really be able to compare my rips of Abbey Road to the Doctor's. I have been told he used the individually MFSL releases rather than the box. And mine will be in brilliant 24-bit 96kHz

If you since most of the commentators like my rips the best, I guess I'll change my user name to "Dr. Robert"!! LOL

And speaking of Dr. Robert, the Revolver is loaded. The listing is in the chamber and will be fired as soon as the Avax admin's approve the listing.

Thanks,

Rob

I have to be honest here. I have both the Box and the individual titles and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of this rip! The Ebbetts are terribly harsh as Ponchoman stated above and these are wonderfully refreshing and smooth. Very natural soundstage. Like the vinyl. Well done! Going to get the previous posts now.
Keep up the fine posts. (~_~)

Siam

Another big thumbs up from ther heart of Texas! These rips are practically bringing tears to my eyes...they sound so good.
I thought the Ebbetts sounded pretty nice until I heard these.
So much smoother and easier on the ears. (once again my humble opinion and as always I could be wrong.)

Thanks again!

(Don't forget to take off the lens cap before you start snapping the photos-Have a good time.)

I have a new hero in this site: YOUR!
Infinite graces for so good work.

rsfoto:

May you hereby be known as Dr. Robert, then! Hah!

And yeah, hopefully we'll be able to determine the differences between your setup and Kel Bazar's. I'm interested to know also what part of pbthal's setup that causes cross-talk/cross-feed that seems to be lacking in your setup. Curious...

Keep em' coming, guys! I'm liking this a lot!

@ponchman,

Who is pbthal? Is he on AxaxHome? I can't find him. Perhaps you can give me a link, I love to investigate his rip.

Search on demonoid for pbthal ;)
He only releases in 16/44, but he does excellent work, usually from original UK pressings, he's also done the Japanese red vinyl monos.

If pbthal only does 16/44 that is the first big difference. And if he never did MFSL rips then it probable is the difference between normal speed mastering and half-speed mastering. From a "Guide to Audiophile LPs", "there is twice as much time for the cutting stylus to cut every possible detail and delicate groove modulation, resulting in LPs where you can hear details and nuances on your favorite albums that you never heard before. Furthermore, mastering at half speed uses less power and as a result the cutting head amplifiers use only one fourth as much power, resulting in much greater head room, better dynamic range, frequency response and lower distortion. This is another reason why resulting audiophile LP's can sound much closer to the sound of the original recording in comparison to standard LPs."

Pressing production runs were small for the limited releases from MFSL. My box was only number 2846 out of 25,000. I doubt if that was the pressing order but my vinyl were no doubt from the first batch of the first press run. So the pressing plates were absolutely mint. I bought my box during the first week of release.

The quality of my set (and all my other MFSL's) after 25 years was amazing. The playing surface was like 1982. I did hardly no manual declicking. I only needed a de-click setting of 10 (out of 100) to remove any dust clicks. I never cleaned them. I never needed a record cleaning machine.

OK... I've been avoiding these "super hifi" vinyl rips because I rip everything to 320k mp3s anyway, and 800 megs seemed like overkill, but now that you're getting to the truly great Beatles albums, you hooked me. Yes, when ripped to mp3 they do sound better than my mp3 rips of the Ebbets MFSLs, which had been the best I had found until now... these are much smoother and less harsh.
It's already "worth" the 800 meg download to get nicer sounding mp3s of my favorite Beatles albums, but I'd hate to waste the potential of these super hifi flacs, but... what do I do with these super files? When I try to play the flacs in WMP it just closes right down, even though I've set it up to play other flacs. Seems rediculous to downsample and burn to a 16bit 44.1k audio cd... does anyone have a suggestion as to the absolute BEST way to enjoy these?

THANKS A MILLION to rsfoto for these fantastic shares!!!

Update: I just went for a walk with the mp3s on my ipod, and the above-mentioned (by ponchoman) schizophrenic stereo separation was very noticeable, more so than on any other versions I've heard. It was actually somewhat disturbing.

Otherwise, though, tonally these are the best Beatles rips I have ever heard... A+++ !!!

You can use VLC or Foobar to play Flac, maybe Winamp to.

freedom2:

iPods will support up to 48kHz, so I advise transcoding from the original FLAC files to 16/48 instead of 16/44. The difference should be somewhat noticeable. I would also recommend using m4a instead of MP3. At the same bitrate, m4a will always provide better sound. I transcode everything to m4a for my iPhone, and the high res stuff at 16/48 since the extra resolution is there to enjoy. I'd encode to Apple Lossless if I had a good encoder that worked with Foobar2000. Note that any higher than 16/48 WILL NOT WORK on an iPhone, and probably won't work on a regular iPod either. Definitely dump MP3, though: the highs are always noticeably compromised compared to m4a.

Now, to play these at full resolution, you really need an external DAC, or a high end sound card. With Windows, you'll also want to use Foobar2000 and ASIO4ALL.

One of the reasons why this sounds nicer than the Ebbetts rip, even at 16/44, is that Ebbetts' setup seems to have a bias on the highs and lows, with recessed mids. Sort of a smiley-face in the frequencies, if you will. The lows are great in his rips, but I've always found the highs to be too harsh for my taste, though his 2008 redos improved on this. Dr. Robert's rip here seems more neutral to my ears, and the stark stereo separation is a factor of the original stereo master. I'm just surprised that pbthal's rips seem to have some kind of cross talk or cross feed that makes this less severe (his vinyl rip of the DCC version of The Doors - Strange Days blends the channels, whereas the DCC CD is starkly separated like many early stereo mixes, before headphones gained much use, when the stereo speakers themselves didn't need cross-feed). I'd love to know the reason for the difference, but this is indeed a wonderful rip. Thanks again!

@ponchoman:
Thanks for the info... I didn't know that ipods can handle 48k, I'll try that. And I've never tried m4a format, I'll explore.
I'm a musician and do have a reasonably high-end sound card, but haven't really explored the software possibilities for "just listening" to music (haha), so I appreciate everyone's suggestions... THANKS!
While I'm here, I just wanted to mention re the stereo balance... upon careful inspection with headphones I realized that the Ebbet's IS just as hard split, it's just that the clarity of the sound on this rip makes it more obvious! I guess Mr Martin learned a few things the following year, as Revolver is very nicely balanced in stereo.

again, thanks rsfoto for this treasure!

@ freedom2,

I use iTunes to listen to my 24/96 rips. No, it does not do Flac. I transcode from FLAC to Apple Lossless at full 24/96 using the third party Mac converter XLD (X Lossless Decoder) and it loads the converts directly into iTunes. Windows users should have a sililar utility. If you can't find a Windows converter that does FLAC to Apple Lossless, then convert FLAC to uncompressed WAV or AIFF. Then iTunes can convert to 24/96 Apple Lossless or 16/48 iPod compatible. To get 16/48 AAC you need to select Import Settings under Preferences. If fact iPods can play Apple Lossless (16/48 yes,@ 24/96 maybe)

I play ALL my music from the computer to my home stereo. For me CD's. DVD and Vinyl LP's are strictly a storage medium format. I only touch the plastic disc when I want to make a new rip.

I finally got a chance to sit down and listen to this vinyl rip of my favorite album of all-time for the first time right now—here in the wee, small hours of the morning. Now playing: "Nowhere Man." Holy sh!t. Wow! This sounds absolutely fantastic. Thanks a million for this superb vinyl rip, Robert! You're a gem. :D

@ GatsbyGirl - Glad you like it, Rubber Soul is one of my all-time favs as well.

oh people don't you know, listening to music through your computer is in most cases the wrong way to listen to music. Put it on disc and let the true sound come out!

if by disc i hope you mean 24/96 wav on dvd-v or dvd-a.

First of all, Thanks for all these great uploads Dr. Robert.
Part of the rapidshare links are dead, caught me in the middle, can
you please repost?

About listening to music through the computer, it is no longer considered to
be inferior, unless one owns a 5000$ CD player. With a descent sound-card
and a little bit of tweaking,one can get great results, even superior to
many CD players. Check these threads for more information:

http://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/vt.mpl?f=pcaudio&m=31286
http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/2/27041.html

@ qwerty11 - I am sorry but I did not keep compatible RAR's for the old download links. You will have to start over. But now you will have two sources for download.

Thanks Doc. :)

New links are posted above

Redbook also apreciate.

@ yerbas07

Sometime soon I will make completely new rips and will include redbook.

In the meantime Dr. Ebbetts MFSL rips are the next best thing for redbook.
http://avaxhome.ws/music/bootlegs/THE_BEATLES_MFSL_DR_EBBETTS_JAPAN.html

Thank you so much rsfoto for your wonderful shares such as this.
Really great stuff!

Say thank you is less than yours merit.Great work!!

dr robert i would LOVE if you put this in cd compatible version!!!
please!!

@ atanganas

These MFSL Beatles I did back when I was rsfoto were all redone in 2010 including redbook. Only Yellow Submarine has no redbook at the present time.

http://avaxhome.ws/hraphile/rubber_soul_mfsl_2010_hqvinyl.html